Johnny Depp (right, with Michael Rispoli) plays a journalist working for a run-down Caribbean newspaper in "The Rum Diary," based on the Hunter S. Thompson novel.
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'Rum Diary' review: Hunter Thompson on the rocks

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The Rum Diary

For about an hour, "The Rum Diary" looks as though it's heading somewhere, and for as long as that sweet illusion is in the air, every good thing about it seems even better: It has a comical but restrained Johnny Depp, an interesting historical setting (Puerto Rico in 1960) and some unusually witty dialogue that sounds like the late Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote the novel upon which it was based.

That the movie is leisurely and unconventional is all part of its charm, too - until it isn't anymore. The movie is a tale of corruption, but then it's not. It's a love story, but no, not quite. Later, it flirts with becoming a great journalism tale, or at least a whimsical journalism tale, but that vein leads nowhere, too. Nor is it much of anything else, except a disordered ramble through Thompson's creative imagination. He was better at nonfiction.

Thompson wrote "The Rum Diary" as a young man in the early 1960s, loosely based on his own experience writing for a sports publication in San Juan, Puerto Rico. That publishers rejected it won't be a mystery to anyone who sees this movie. (It wasn't published until 1998.) As a storyteller, Thompson seems unable to let go and let his story and his characters take him to places where he doesn't feel safe. Instead, he keeps short-circuiting his imagination and retreating to the familiar - to people sitting around getting drunk or stoned and making rote pronouncements about the soul of America.

Still, by the time the truth dawns about "The Rum Diary," the movie has built up too much audience goodwill for it to become an object of scorn. We just wish it were better. Here and there, fleetingly, it is.

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Depp, who goes through the movie doing a not-so-subtle impersonation of Thompson, plays Kemp, a journalist who takes a job at the San Juan Star. A burgeoning alcoholic, he falls in with his fellow drunks but also gets swept into the circle of a glib and glamorous businessman, Sanderson, played by Aaron Eckhart. Needless to say there's a woman involved, too - a damsel in a tower in need of rescue - who happens to be living with the shady Sanderson.

Amber Heard plays the woman of our hero's dreams, though the first time you see her with Depp you might, for a second, think he's just taking a fatherly interest. It's an awkward pairing. At 48, Depp is an undiminished romantic lead, but at 25 and looking more like 20, Heard is too young for him. It's just brutal to cast her as a woman able to dazzle two mature, intelligent men, when she is at least a half-dozen years away from that even being possible.

People who enjoy "The Rum Diary" will respond to its world. Behind the humor, there's a sense of despair, of being lost and living in some outpost at the edge of the country. The sense is enhanced by the performance of Michael Rispoli as Kemp's friend, who gives us a man who's competent and appealing but has the aura of someone who has been dumped out of a car. The atmosphere is amplified further by the odd ugly detail, such as several cockfights that look too real for comfort, and the occasional line that rings with perfect irony: "Imagine what it must be like," Kemp says, "to be an alcoholic."

Unfortunately, the world is undercut, as well, by Thompson's too-ready penchant for caricature and shorthand, with the villains portrayed as right-wing lunatics out of "Dr. Strangelove." Giovanni Ribisi is saddled with a grotesque role, as a shaman-like drunk who walks around in rags making sage pronouncements - it's like a pop culture distortion of the '60s before they even happened. The character could have been cut and should have been.

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